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Month: July 2016

Sometimes (mostly out of the blue) you get this heavy bout of emotions hitting you simultaneously in the head and heart and you can hardly find a reason for it; all you can do in such instances is to close your eyes, take a deep breath and try to wash the feeling away.

It isn’t always a negative experience though. Sometimes it could just be a wave of weariness hitting you, or just a short shot of leftover emotions that have not completely passed from the previous encounter. It only becomes problematic when it changes your overall mood, or results in a prolonged dip in emotions.

People who are depressed experience this very often, and it causes their base happiness level to be lower, and usually disrupts and shortens any spell of happiness or positive emotions that they experience. It lurks in the background and threatens to override any form of positivity present.

Sounds pretty dreadful indeed. There are however counter measures to take if you happen to be someone who experiences this (often or otherwise) injection of negativity. I shall leave you to think of what these methods are for the time being and to devise and share some ideas for the benefit of yourself as well as others.

This one shall be on my pet subject of many years now, and it is on solitude and loneliness (critically, their differences). I have written quite a bit on this topic over the years, and I have somehow become decently acquainted with these two words over the many times I have penned my thoughts down on them.

Perhaps you would disagree with me, but I see solitude as a state and loneliness as an emotion. Why do I say that? Well you can do things and live your life in solitude, and it is solitude rather than loneliness if you do not feel the void or the emptiness as you go about your every day.

You can certainly say loneliness is a state too, but it is not so if it is not cemented by the intensity of the aloneness that you feel. Fundamentally, loneliness can be referred to as a state induced by the feeling of emptiness or a deep desire for affection and interaction; if simplified, it can also be viewed in its naked light as that very feeling itself.

On the other hand, solitude is more of a choice that you make with regards to your lifestyle and the way you conduct your life. You may like to do things alone, be alone, live alone, and go about your every day (largely) alone; this is a decision you make and has no resultant or accompanying emotion (yes of course emotions are always present, but you get what I mean).

As such we can see solitude as a behavioural pattern, while loneliness is a feeling that may or may not accompany this solitude. Given the innate nature of humans as social creatures, it is not wrong to say that all who live in solitude will experience bouts of loneliness once in awhile (with the duration and intensity varying from individual to individual and from circumstance to circumstance), but it is not however true to say that those who are lonely experience states of solitude since loneliness itself is not a choice.

Solitude is a good thing: we all need time alone with ourselves to better acquaint us with who we are as persons, to better know our natures. The same cannot be said for excesses of it as it most likely would leave a person starved of interaction and affection. Loneliness on the flip side, in any amounts of it, is not ideal as it is firstly a very painful experience, and it could also lead an individual to do things which may have adverse effects on himself or those around him.

It is good to know the differences between solitude and loneliness. You can then assess for yourself if you are actually in a state of solitude, or if you are using it as a disguise to mask the loneliness that is lurking deep within yourself. Kudos to you if solitude is your preferred way of life, though it is also prudent to acknowledge it if you find that what lies behind it is just a wardrobe of lonely bones and hidden woes.

Are you enjoying your solitude, or are you unbeknownst to others drowning in loneliness? Take a moment to find out for yourself.

I’ve been wondering why I haven’t been writing prose or stories on my blog or anywhere else online for quite awhile now, and the answer does seem to be eluding me.

Do I not have the writing prowess to churn out decent work on specific topics?

Do I not want to share my opinion on issues so as to avoid scrutiny or discussions?

I don’t think it’s either of the above. I suspect it’s because I’ve gotten tired of looking at my own thoughts and opinions beyond the place where they are most comfortable in, which is in my head, naturally. To see these thoughts translate into words on a page or a virtual space, it seems like an imperfect expression of all the massive mental workings that is going on within the tiny physical confines of the brain (and not mind, because who can quantify the mind, physically or otherwise?).

An article, a prose, while they do essentially capture a certain aspect of your thoughts, are limited and committed merely to how you craft them. Once you commit them into ink or print, they create an impression of you and your thoughts that may or may not be true; the words give the author a personality, and vice versa. It may reveal a part of who you intrinsically are, or it may misportray it regrettably.

And we haven’t gotten to the emotional bit of writing yet, a domain that is arguably distinct from the cognitive process itself. Words at best can only give a faint reflection of the raw emotions that arise in a person at any given point of time. Since it is already itself a mammoth of a task for a person to accurately pinpoint to himself how he is feeling at any one moment (without even determining the reason for the emotion), how much more difficult would it be to express them in words to impress upon others these emotions?

This is exactly why brilliant writers are always so celebrated by the world. They have the ability to capture, even if imperfectly, the raw essence of emotions and parts of the human spirit, as well as convert sophisticated trains of thoughts into understandable language. They make us more comprehensible to ourselves.

To be able to write is a gift, and indeed one that is often powerful and influential. Looking back at the above paragraphs I’ve written, I realise that perhaps I am not that weary of watching my thoughts play out on a piece of paper or space anymore. I think the physical manifestation of thoughts in the form of words is beautiful (though at the same time essentially imperfection), and perhaps it is this inadequacy that is touching and perfect at the same time. It reveals the sophistication of the human mind, and the dynamism of everything around us.